‘Come for a walk with me, dear Harry,’ said Janet.

I declined to be protected in such a manner, absurdly on my dignity; and the refusal, together possibly with some air of contemptuous independence in the tone of it, brought the squire to a climax.  ’You won’t go out and walk with her?  You shall go down on your knees to her and beg her to give you her arm for a walk.  By God! you shall, now, here, on the spot, or off you go to your German princess, with your butler’s legacy, and nothing more from me but good-bye and the door bolted.  Now, down with you!’

He expected me to descend.

‘And if he did, he would never have my arm.’  Janet’s eyes glittered hard on the squire.

’Before that rascal dies, my dear, he shall whine like a beggar out in the cold for the tips of your fingers!’

‘Not if he asks me first,’ said Janet.

This set him off again.  He realized her prospective generosity, and contrasted it with my actual obtuseness.  Janet changed her tactics.  She assumed indifference.  But she wanted experience, and a Heriot to help her in playing a part.  She did it badly—­overdid it; so that the old man, now imagining both of us to be against his scheme for uniting us, counted my iniquity as twofold.  Her phrase, ‘Harry and I will always be friends,’ roused the loudest of his denunciations upon me, as though there never had been question of the princess, so inveterate was his mind’s grasp of its original designs.  Friends!  Would our being friends give him heirs by law to his estate and name?  And so forth.  My aunt Dorothy came to moderate his invectives.  In her room the heavily-burdened little book of figures was produced, and the items read aloud; and her task was to hear them without astonishment, but with a business-like desire to comprehend them accurately, a method that softened the squire’s outbursts by degrees.  She threw out hasty running commentaries:  ’Yes, that was for a yacht’; and ‘They were living at the Court of a prince’; such and such a sum was ’large, but Harry knew his grandfather did not wish him to make a poor appearance.’

‘Why, do you mean to swear to me, on your oath, Dorothy Beltham,’ said the squire, amazed at the small amazement he created ’you think these two fellows have been spending within the right margin?  What’ll be women’s ideas next!’

‘No,’ she answered demurely.  ’I think Harry has been extravagant, and has had his lesson.  And surely it is better now than later?  But you are, not making allowances for his situation as the betrothed of a princess.’

’That ‘s what turns your head,’ said he; and she allowed him to have the notion, and sneer at herself and her sex.

‘How about this money drawn since he came home?’ the squire persisted.

My aunt Dorothy reddened.  He struck his finger on the line marking the sum, repeating his demand; and at this moment Captain Bulsted and Julia arrived.  The ladies manoeuvred so that the captain and the squire were left alone together.  Some time afterward the captain sent out word that he begged his wife’s permission to stay to dinner at the Grange, and requested me to favour him by conducting his wife to Bulsted:  proof, as Julia said, that the two were engaged in a pretty hot tussle.  She was sure her William would not be the one to be beaten.